


My Heart Gathered Dust (The Way Your Books Never Did)

by pyralite (cardialCatharsis)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, M/M, Mikasa-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 17:20:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2237184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cardialCatharsis/pseuds/pyralite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even when they were homeless, and angry and afraid, it was Armin who kept them sane, his mind plucking the words of fairy tales from his memory and creating whole new stories to keep them calm on bad nights. </p><p>That’s the first thing Mikasa remembered about Armin Arlert.</p><p>And now on a night worse than any others she had gone through before, there was no Armin with his gentle blue eyes and soft palms to hold, there was just ash and choking smoke, and a body burnt at its centre.<br/>-<br/>Let it never be said that Mikasa did not love Armin Arlert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Heart Gathered Dust (The Way Your Books Never Did)

**Author's Note:**

> I hate seeing fics where Mikasa dislikes Armin/loves Eren more for some reason, because that girl adores Armin and he adores her right back.
> 
> And hopefully in canon, he won't have to die for you to see that.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there lived a princess whose beauty and intelligence rivalled no other.

She had hair as bright as day, and eyes as clear as the sky, and when she spoke, the birds of the land and the creatures of the forest did so deign to listen.

As beautiful and brilliant as the princess was, she was weak, so the King and Queen put her in a tower for her own safety.

The tower was made of the sturdiest stone bricks, and topped by a spiralling roof as red as the sunset.

A dragon was also given to her, to protect her from any harm, and the dragon had eyes green as emeralds, and a roar as loud as thunder.

The princess fell in love with her dragon and her tower, and she lived for years in happy bliss with them both.

Until one day, she was snatched away from them.

And the dragon and the tower wept.

-

When they were 10 years old, Armin showed Mikasa the outside world.

The book was old and yellowed, the pages worn with the effort of being flipped through many times, and yet it smelt less like dust and age and more like sunflowers and something distinctly Armin that she could never place.  
He must’ve slept with that book under his pillow for a long time, she remembered thinking, and he probably did. Armin adored that book as much as he adored Mikasa and Eren.

They would sit under the same tree every day, Mikasa on the left and Eren on the right, both cuddling into Armin’s small body, hanging on to every word he read from his dusty tome.

Mikasa still remembers the way he read, there was something about it, the enunciation and lull of his words different from Mrs Jaeger’s bedtime stories or Hannes’ drunken military tales, soothing and hypnotic.

Even when they were homeless, and angry and afraid, it was Armin who kept them sane, his mind plucking the words of fairy tales from his memory and creating whole new stories to keep them calm on bad nights.

That’s the first thing Mikasa remembered about Armin Arlert.

And now on a night worse than any others she had gone through before, there was no Armin with his gentle blue eyes and soft palms to hold, there was just ash and choking smoke, and a body burnt at its centre.

-

Mikasa had known that Eren would snap one day, for all of her trust and belief in him, the rage in her brother was getting too wild to hold back.

But she hadn’t known that this would be what would set it off.

The death of Armin Arlert took them all by surprise, one moment he was riding beside them, another training mission in their busy Survey Corps trainee lives, and the next, he was gone. Plucked into the air by a leaping abberant, they heard his shrill screams only when the titan had dropped his body into its horrible, salivating mouth.

She had been the first to move, flying off her horse with blades in hand, but the titan was fast, it left as quickly as it came to join the hoard of other titans before them. At her distant right she heard the crackling of lightning, and an explosion. Eren had transformed.

The Rogue Titan smashed through every titan that stood in his way, his eyes glowing a brighter green than usual, and Mikasa as well killed more titans that day than she ever had, all in a frantic attempt to get back their best friend.

When they finally got to him, covered in gastric juice and just cut out of a titan’s stomach, Mikasa stopped breathing.

Maybe the titan had crushed him already before swallowing, maybe he had broken upon impact of its steaming intestines, but Armin was already dead, limbs snapped in a hundred different places and eyes glazed over.

Eren screamed and shook him, again and again and again but it was all in vain because he was dead and anyone could’ve seen that. Anyone. But Mikasa only stopped him when the tears threatened to overwhelm her eyes.

“He’s gone.” She whispered, and Eren sobbed, a sound as terrible as Armin’s screams.

She didn’t cry. She couldn’t, if she did then who would be the one to wipe them up? Gone was a blonde boy with a threadbare handkerchief, who had words that could stop armies if not their sobbing combined.

But as she climbed up onto her horse, the Squad Leader stopped her.

Her hands were shaking so hard she could not grasp the reigns.

-

They gave him a soldier’s funeral, for all his contributions Armin should’ve been given that of a Colonel or General, but they had no room for an orphaned fifteen year old’s body in the memorial grounds, so they burnt him.

“We’ll take his ashes and spread them in the sea,” Jean said quietly, what was left of their group watched the flames in similar silence. “We’ll get there, I know it.”

She doubted that now, she doubted if she even wanted to see the outside world that Armin so adored, because every grain of sand and every thrash of the waves against the shore would remind her of the way his eyes lit up when they opened those books.

What was the point in fulfilling his dream, without him?

A familiar figure was missing from the group of soldiers paying respects, Eren Jaeger was missing, and she suppose the others would find it odd that he did not attend his best friend’s funeral.

But she understood, if Eren had to see Armin’s body being burnt, he might have broken further than he already was. Yet, she was here wasn’t she? She was here watching his body turning to ash and she was here legs trembling and chest tightening unbearably, so why did Eren get to run, why did Eren get to hide from this merciless world while she faced it head-on?

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. But the world wasn’t fair and she learnt that when she was 9 and covered in the blood of her own kidnappers and she learnt that when she was 15 and covered in the blood of her best friend.

No, nothing was fair at all.

The world was cruel, merciless, and now lacking the only beauty she had come to know.

-

Eren’s night terrors got worse, they allowed them to sleep together now, the both of them, out of pity for what happened.

But it gave neither any comfort, if anything it served as a greater reminder of the dent in their once-trio.

She didn’t know how to comfort him, she never figured out how, but Armin did. He would comb through his hair soothingly, whisper quiet things in his ear. She always got the sense of seeing something she shouldn’t have when they did that, like it was a moment that belonged to Eren and Armin and she was intruding upon it.

Mikasa, with her strength comparable to a hundred armed soldiers, did not have the power to calm Eren down.

So she watched as he thrashed and turned in their narrow, shared bed, until finally she put her hand on his head, hesitantly.

Immediately, he stopped shaking, and as she stroke his hair with long, fluid motions, his breathing started to regulate, frenzied gasps turning to content sighs.

“Armin…” Eren murmured, “Armin….”

“Please don’t leave me.”

Armin Arlert, of height approximately 5 feet and 4 inches, had left a hole in them the size of Wall Maria.

-

She supposed it was selfish of her to keep something of his like this, but Eren already had his old clothes, his cloak, was it unfair of Mikasa to keep just this one keepsake?

Mikasa was there when Armin had bought the book, he had scrimped and saved his meagre soldier’s salary for months until he could afford to buy it on one of their off-days out.

It was a book, fairy tales, he had said. Despite Eren’s absence that day, his most recent fight with Jean had warranted them both cleaning duty for that entire afternoon, Armin still read it to her, under the closest shady tree they could find.

It wasn’t exactly as it had been before, but she was content again to hear his voice, producing tales and flights of fancy of princesses and dragons and magic.

“You look like those princesses in the book, Armin.” She had said, and Armin laughed, a sound like raindrops and bells.

“If I’m the princess, then Eren is the dragon and you are the tower.”

Mikasa had been confused, “Why are we the tower and dragon? Who is the knight then?”

“Well the princess never did say she needed a knight, I think she was happy with just the dragon and her tower.” Armin explained, “They kept her safe and sound so she could sleep easy at night, much more easily than on the back of a horse anyway.”

He left the book under his bed, where it gathered dust in the months after his death, and oddly, only now did Mikasa think to retrieve it. It didn’t smell as old as the other book had, but it still held the lingering scent of him, sunflowers, and the something she never did place. The pages still had evidence of the frequency of which they were flipped, and Mikasa placed her hand on a particularly worn one.

She could not read the words, but the adjacent picture was one she was familiar with;

A princess, a tower and a dragon.  
-  
There’s a hollowness in Eren’s eyes now.

He fights still, years after Armin’s passing, and so does she, but they fight empty, void of any semblance of passion.

She still keeps the book under her pillow, dusting and wiping it every day to maintain it, and yet it still yellows under her care. It frustrates her, makes her angry beyond her own understanding, perhaps it is because if the book falls apart at her hands, it will be like watching Armin leave them all over again.

Humanity suffers loss after loss, and they watch friend after friend die in battle.

It feels so futile, what had they been fighting for anyway? The dreams of a boy no more had become nothing but painful memories.

When she goes to bed that night, aching and tired, she closes her eyes and clamps her hands tight over her ears.

But she can’t remember his voice anymore, no matter how hard she tries.

-

Maybe somewhere, Armin waits under a tree, for his tower and his dragon to come home.


End file.
